The billion dollar (!) campaign against Obama

I READ THAT the Republican Voting for Dollars high command vigorously led by the Karl Roves will spend $1 billion to defeat  President Obama in November.  I can't honestly tell you how many zeroes follow the $1.  I spend more of my time rounding off the entries in  my checkbook to the nearest dollar.  But don't be surprised if some mathematician at MIT turns up on Fox News to give us a mental image of $1 billion by reporting that if you laid  $1 billion end to end, they would stretch all the way to the U.S.Chamber of Commerce,   various oil companies and,  of course, the Koch Brothers  before arriving with a new guy in the Oval Office.

The trouble with  billions and trillions is that even the modern financiers who toss around such figures have never really seen them. Nobody ever has.  In that sense, they are abstractions  that filter through the wealthiest levels of society as  imagined over the morning coffee. The mysterious figures are never precise because it is easy enough to round off the  dangling millions to make a billion come out even.

Who can appear as a news show panelist freely talking about $1,297, 082,093.36?  Nobody.  Not even Donald Trump. So if one of Mitt Romney's surrogates mentions a billion here and a billion there,  ask him to be more precise.  That will change the subject.

But come to think of it, if you drop the R from Mitt's last name, the remaining letters are an anagram of  money.  Now I think we're getting somewhere.

Florida: Where a decorated vet is told he can't vote

DO YOU KNOW  the fellow in the picture?

No? If not, you have a lot of company .  The election officials in Florida don't know him either.  That explains why, at the urging of the state's kookish Republican governor,  they have included Bill Internicola in the massive purge of people who want to vote this year in the never-ending GOP quest to smash fraud wherever it exists - or doesn't exist.

Let me tell you about  this designated victim of Gov. Rick Scott's hit list.  He's 91, a decorated WWII veteran (Bronze Star for bravery in the Battle of the Bulge) and  for the past 14 years has voted in Florida.

Not good enough for the state's flawed election bureaucracy - the same one that wiped a lot of voters in the 2000 presidential election  in which George Bush defeated Al Gore in the state by 537 votes  with help from the U.S.Supreme Court.

So here we go again.  While GOP officials scoff at references to their efforts as "voter cleansing", there is no reason to believe them for the Republican-led assaults on voter lists across the country that largely deny blacks and Latinos a visit to the voter booth. There was a time when the party prayed for bad weather  to keep certain voters from the polls;  that, plus poll taxes down south.

Internicola is the second case in this messy plot to reach the Net , largely exposed by ThinkProgress. By the way, it also noted that in the first five months of 2012,  three major newspapers - the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today - failed to mention a word about the scandalous behavior  in the  Sunshine State.  See how easy it is for me to be cynical.

 We mentioned in an earlier blog Maureen Russo, who has yet to be reinstated to the eligibility list  despite her valid profile.  So if your local Republican officials  tell you that there is no plot to deny selected voters their rights with the shopworn guise of good government,  let them scoff and sputter.  But don't believe them.  They are lying - which is one of the few things that they do well.

Fair question for Detroit native son Romney

Yippee!   We can all relax and move on to less important matters.  Mitt Romney has released his birth certificate showing that he was born in Detroit.

Or was he?  Hmmm...

Unlike his good friend Donald Trump, a prominent but  moronic  birther who continues to hound President Obama without stern dissent from Mitt, I will rise above the cursed battle and take the Republican candidate's word for it if he can identify Al Kaline  and Dizzy Trout.

,

Joe Ricketts: A billionaire out of his league

WHEN WE LAST looked in on Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade, he was hosting a plan that would have smeared President Obama  with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright gambit that failed four years ago.  But when the GOP Golden Oldie  was exposed, you'd think he would have turned his attention to his family- owned Chicago Cubs.  It can be easily authenticated that the team that once boasted of Ernie Banks, Ron Santo  and Stan Hack ended  its 12-game losing streak on Memorial Day.  For the Cubs, it wasn't another day at the office.

But for all of their riches, billionaires do get bored.  There is nothing left to satisfy their whimsical illusions.   Who can imagine a guy like Ricketts  fretting about the Cubs like a kid from a North Side Chicago sandlot?  You can't.  So Rickets has now found a new path for his intended destruction of President Obama.  It's a book  called "The Roots of Obama's Rage," written by a far-right polemicist Dinesh  d'Souza in 2010 and headed for a documentary! D'Souza insists that Obama is ready to punish America's colonialism  by supporting anticolonialists around the world.  One line in the book will suffice:  "For Obama, the radical Muslims are on the right side of history - that's why he is so unnaturally solicitous toward them."

Ricketts describes D'Souza as a "respected scholar".

Joe, shouldn't you be spending more time looking around for  some pitchers for the Cubs?

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Speaking of boredom, should John McCain's friends find something more productive for him to do on Sunday mornings?  As we've all known for years, he has been the leading go-to guy for the Sunday morning talk shows .  I don't know why that is.  Certainly not because he makes any  sense. Maybe because he figures no one will again ask him why  he agreed to Sarah Palin as his exciting chaperone on the ticket.   Maybe it's because he's not considered to be as crazy as most of the Beltway Republicans. It's certainly not any profound insights that he brings to the table. Old soldiers like McCain don't even fade away.

I should tell you that I stopped watching  these shows a long time ago.  They are so politically correct with pundits on both sides with George Will forever reading the liberals last will and testament.  Except for Fox News, an outfit  from whom I would never buy a used car.

From what I read, McCain showed up at Fox to denounce Obama  for not solving all of the problems in the Middle East. He thought Obama should have been doing more "stuff" to resolve the issues and that we should stay in Afghanistan for an eternity.  I tire.  Do you think he's still sulking  because as a military hero he lost to some upstart community organizer whose skin color was never acceptable in the Oval Office until 2008?

The winnowing is under way in Florida again

 

THERE'S AN unpopular fellow down in Florida named Rick Scott who happens to be the  governor.  How he was elected to that job is one of  the great mysteries of our time. I only know that he is the former CEO of HCA Healthcare, which has since paid the Federal government $1.7  billion in fines for Medicare fraud.  That could  be a record in a day when  records are usually  broken every day.  From those closer to the scene, I learned that during the investigation of HCA's scalpel-less handiwork,  Scott took the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a deposition.

Anyway, Scott is the  bell cow for the voter purge in
Florida that heightens  the Republican-controlled scandal that separates the wheat from the chaff, and then gets rid of the wheat.  It's all in the name of good government with savage GOP attempts to reduce voter fraud that they have yet to prove exists. In the 2000  election, the state dumped 7000 voters,  most of whom were believed to be eligible.  The Republicans use it as a an election tool, which I have read is how they do it in some foreign countries run by dictators..

By now, you are probably wondering about the woman in the photo holding a poodle (?). Her name is Maureen Russo, born in Akron, and now in  the dog boarding and grooming business in Ft. Lauderdale with her husband. According to ThinkProgress, she's been declared ineligible because she "wasn't born in this country".   I've lived in the Akron area for many years, and this is a new one on me.  

Actually Mrs. Russo has been a registered voter for 40 years.  But before she can  challenge the state, she has to ask for an administration hearing  that will grind her through the bureaucracy. It's never pleasant.   If were her, I would show up with one of those Goodyear tire ashtrays  as Exhibit No. 1.

In Florida, it will be easier for a Republican voter with a coconut for a head to enter the voting booth than  folks like Mrs. Russo.   It's a shameful way to do business, governor, even if it has nothing to do with Medicare fraud.    But shame is never something they think about when an election is at stake.  

Ode to returning birther Donald Trump

Humpty Trumpty
Sat on a wall
Humpty Trumpty
Had a great fall
All of Mitt's horses
And all of Bain's men
Can't put Trumpty together again!

Repent - the end is near!

I am beginning to feel that the hysterics of the political and religious fringe this campaign season are an allegory of how the world will end - not  by solar storms, flood , fire or locusts but by shrieks and a torrent of mindless babbling as people discover  that the end is near.  Nowadays, the news cycle is not complete without more reports from one apocalyptic  dead-ender  or another that demons are descending upon our bedeviled planet. And a lot of it  is coming from people once thought to be sane enough to get elected.

From Arizona, for example, came word that the Republican secretary of state suggested he might keep President Obama off his state's ballot unless Hawaii provided irrefutable proof that Obama was not born beyond paradise.  I thought we had been there the last time.  Ken Bennett, the election boss, soon recanted but not before he moved to the top of the most-ridiculed list amid strong competition. The secretary of state, for God's sake!

Folks like Bennett have become desperate in sustaining the moronic  cult of birtherism.  He said he was merely responding to questions from his constituents.  That made no more sense than to revive the old myth that there are alligators sloshing around in New York City's sewers. (They're not?)  Oh, some diehard birthers want us to know in their end of days  scenario that Obama's real father was named Frank Marshall Davis, who, alas,  was a communist.

In Iowa, the so-called Republican Party has prepared a draft platform that calls for proof that a presidential candidate is a natural born citizen.  And they are so impatient to instill purity in the Oval Office they want the proof in time  for the 2012 election. The platform also wants to ban  money for Planned Parenthood, end stem cell research and eliminate all school activities on Sundays or Wednesday nights,  which they contend conflicts with Baptists'  prayer meetings.

(None of this will matter if the planet  disappears before the Republican convention in Tampa. We can hope.)

Alas, there''s more. Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.)  questions Obama's  birth certificate; Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) doesn't think  that Obama is American "in his heart". In North Carolina a preacher named Charles R. Worley has topped the list of homophobes by demanding that gays and lesbians  be penned up behind an electrified fence and  left to die, adding that Obama  was a "baby killer and homosexual lover." Other Obamaphobes  more gently refer to him as a "half-breed".

The hate pouring out of some pulpits and along the circuit  today could bend spoons.  No matter.  Who will need a  spoon when the lights go out on all of us, including the Rev. Worleys,  in the land of the free?





   

Roger, he's that fellow in the White House!

Roger Ailes, the president and guru of Fox News, says he has a problem with Barack Obama, as  if we didn't know when the Fox hunters cast come calling.

Ailes complains:  "We still don't know anything about Obama."

You'd think that with Ailes' vast news resources, one of his savvy people would begin to fill him in by whispering to  Roger that Obama is the president of the United States.      

Chicago...that toddling town

One of the gems of Chicago lore is the quaint  tale of how the Chicago Cubs  have been a miserable baseball team  for so long because of the "Billy Goat Curse".  As it has been explained,  the curse derived from an unhappy Greek saloon-keeper who had a pet goat in his tavern across the street from Wrigley Field. When he tried to enter the stadium with his goat during the 1945 World Series, he was turned back because the goat had an unpleasant odor. The Cubs didn't win that series and have never played in one ever since.   Sam Sianis,  the goat's owner, is said to have laid an eternal  curse on the wretched Cubs  over the incident.

Other versions of the team's woes  have survived, but  I like this one because it fits  perfectly  into the city's exceptional  trail of colorful characters  - whether sinister, deadly or just your  average Runyonesque  ward-heelers. One of the latter, a Democratic alderman,   once knowingly responded to a complaint that a city project would  tear up too much green space.  "You can have too much grass," he said with a straight face.

 Then there was  alderman  Mathias "Paddy" Bauer, a  friend of former titanic Mayor Richard J. Daley,  who declared early in his spotty political career,"Chicago ain't ready for reform".

Much of the city's political shenanigans was recorded by the late columnist Mike Royko, who rose to journlistic stardom simply by recording what the hooligans were uttering with an unusual writer's eye for detail. (During the  many times that I visited the Chicago area,  I looked forward to watching Columnist Irv Kupcinet on a  TV show with his unique version of the English language.  In one instance, in good form, he came up with  the unforgettable term, "misleading nomers".   Somehow it worked in the context of the Daley-controlled wards.)

Newt Gingrich never  let anyone forget that President Obama was a community organizer on Chicago's South Side where Saul Alinsky held forth for many years.  What he never said was that Alinsky was conservative in some respects, patriotic, ate at the best steakhouses  and included a Catholic priest, businessmen and a member of the Marshall Field department store  family among his many his friends.  (Of course, Newt said a lot of things that weren't true.)

Deservedly,  the Democrats were accused of all sorts of political mischief to sustain their hegemony over Sandburg's  "Hog butcher for the world".  Yet  Chicago also came to be known as the "the city that works."  My late father-in-law, a suburban businessman  with an office  in the Loop, was a Republican who praised Daley.  "I've never voted for a Democrat, but if I lived in the city, I'd vote for Dick Daley," he said.

I should tell you that these vignettes of the lives and times of the impolite  Chicago pols was encouraged by a recent Republican implosion that added another notch to the city's awkward political history,  Meet Joe Ricketts, bloated billionaire, right-winger  and founder of the on-line  brokerage, TD Ameritrade.  It surely ranks higher than a mere dishonorable mention. Although Ricketts  is full of denials, he was nearing the moment when he would put up $10 million  in an advertising assault  on President Obama, described in the plan as a "metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln."  (I can't imagine Billy Goat Sianis or Paddy Bauer using a word like "metrosexual," can you?  In their day, it would have cost them tons of support on the street.)

The  key to the attack on Obama would be the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a dumb idea back in 2008 whose sponsors planned to stretch a few more wearying miles.

Funny,  but there may be a link to the Billy Goat Curse here. The Cubs are currently in last place and in an extended losing streak.  At the same time, thre NY Times" exposure of  Ricketts' association with the anti-Obama preliminaries probably has set back  his efforts to haul in $300 million in taxpayer money to rennovate  Wrigley Field,  in which the Ricketts family-owned Chicago Cubs, play -  when they're up to it.

Worse yet, the mayor of Chicago is a feisty Democrat named Rahm Emanuel, former top-ranking member of the Obama team.   When Ricketts called Emanuel after the Times article appeared, the mayor didn't bother to return the call.

Yep, irony of ironies, the same Joe Ricketts who also founded the Ending Spending Fund to reduce government spending.

Mitt Romney tells us to rely on the business world because they know how to do it.

On the other   hand, Mike Royko might have won another Pulitzer  playing with this one.

From heart-felt Americans on the right

The weekly leftovers:

When Mitt Romney   was asked about Rush Limbaugh's reference to Sandra Fluke as a slut, he cagily  responded that it wasn't "the language I would have used"  without telling us what language he would have used. Little did it prepare us for later mystical utterances that mark the candidate . When reporters asked him about the cabal being cooked up in Chicago  by the billionaire owner of the Chicago Cubs that would revive the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue in the 2008 campaign,  he topped the earlier Limbaugh dust-up. Asked about a comment he made on the Hannity show that the president wanted America to be a "less Christian nation", Romney was prepared for it:

"I'm not familiar, precisely , with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."

Pinned on the shelf of my office is one of the classic political responses that I've encountered over the years. It was spoken by George W. Bush, and could be of more use to Romney.  Said Dubya to a nosy reporter:

"I would have to ask the questions...I haven't had a chance to ask the questioners the question they've been questioning." 

But with nearly six months to go, there's still time for Mitt  to build on that.

* * * * *

I'm beginning to see attack ads on the Internet against Sen.  Sherrod Brown by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks.  No mention of Brown's Republican opponent Josh Mandel in the ads.  But adding the right-wing FreedomWorks to the American Petroleum Institute and U.S.Chamber of Commerce tells me  why Mandel was repeatedly absent from his Ohio duties tending to his fund-raising needs.  His campaign has already spent millions on TV advertising.  For Mandel, right-wing money never sleeps.

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Want a quote that pretty well sums up the dark side of  what is happening in the presidential campaign?  Try this one from Colorado U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, a Republican:

'I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America.  I don't know that.  But I do know this, that in his heart, he's not an American.  He's just not an American."

An odd presumption for a guy who isn't even a cardiologist!

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When e.e. cummings poetically mused about the "sound of one hand clapping," he could very well have envisioned the GOP class when it was announced George W. Bush, the economic wizard who financed the budget-busting Iraq invasion on the cuff,  has written a book on how to build a stronger economy. It won't have the slightest potential to be made into a movie.

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Joe Hallett of the Columbus Dispatch reports that Portage County Republican Chairman Andrew Manning has been interviewed by the FBI regarding Manning's charges that he was asked by Gov. Kasich's headhunters to withdraw from the the GOP  State Central Committee.

Manning accused Summit County Chairman Alex Arshinkoff and his sidekick Bryan Williams  of urging  him to resign in return for having a a stronger calling card in the Kasich Administration.  Manning at the time supported State Chairmaan Kevin DeWine to retain the chair in the bitter ongoing clash with Kasich, who wanted to oust DeWine - which he did.

Hallett says Arshinkoff and Williams have denied offering Manning a deal in a meeting  at Portage Country Club.  Where else?